Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
OSD Setup And Calibration Of The NEC EA244UHD
All of the EA-series monitors we’ve tested employ the same OSD. It’s pretty extensive and covers not only calibration, but many other features like PBP, energy use and ergonomics. To bring up the main menu, touch the Menu button.
OSD Tour
Every option has a little fly-out box, similar to the one above. Navigation is intuitive, and we're confident that you'll quickly adapt to it. Brightness controls the backlight, as expected. But you do get a separate Black Level control. For PC signals, we left this setting at its default. From the factory, Eco Mode is turned on, which limits brightness. Turn it off to unlock the monitor’s full luminance range.
The Human Sensing options utilize sensors on the EA244UHD’s bezel. They can detect the presence or absence of a user and turn off the monitor when appropriate.
The final field contains the six picture modes. You really only need to use Standard since the actual color modes are contained in another menu.
Image size and position are adjustable if your incoming signal is lower than native resolution. Moreover, Video Level can be set to Normal or Expand, though the option only works with the HDMI inputs. Normal is fine for PC signals and Expand is used for video sources like Blu-ray or cable boxes.
Response Improve increases the pixel clock to minimize motion blur.
Uniformity is a compensation feature that can be either on or off. It’s only designed to affect white, not the entire luminance range. In our tests, it reduced brightness by 15 percent, and had a positive effect on our white field and color uniformity tests.
There are five color presets: Full, sRGB, Adobe, DICOM and Programmable. You're able to manipulate each one through the RGB sliders or the full CMS. Programmable is used when you calibrate with the SpectraView application.
The CMS has Hue, Offset (luminance) and Saturation sliders for each color. Our out-of-box measurements were so good that we couldn’t make any improvement with them. It’s great to see such a complete set of image controls in a business-class product.
Flip over to the next menu and you get audio controls that include volume and source selectors. Video Detect automatically switches to an active input when a signal is present.
The star feature is Multi Picture, though. You can have up to six sources active at once with as many as four displayed on-screen simultaneously. Choosing one in the Active Picture sub-menu lets you adjust image parameters for only that source. It’s pretty cool and eliminates the need for a separate matrix box in multi-source applications. We can see this being particularly useful in video surveillance systems.
The remaining options address energy use. You can dim the power LED, set a power save timer, shut off power to the USB ports and return all settings to their factory defaults.
The OSD is available in nine languages, can stay on-screen for up to 120 seconds or be locked out completely. Hot Key refers to the bezel keys for volume, brightness, input and multi-picture. You can turn them off if you wish. Data Copy and Customize Setting work with the ControlSync feature. With that, you can daisy-chain up to six EA244UHDs and control them as a single unit.
NEC always includes energy usage info in its products. You can enter your per-unit costs and see exactly how the monitor impacts your monthly electric bill.
Finally, you get a basic signal information screen with resolution, refresh rate and the monitor’s serial number.
Calibration
The EA244UHD is the first monitor we’ve ever reviewed that could not be improved by an instrumented calibration. It’s so good out of the box that nothing we tried would make it any more accurate. The only adjustments we made were to set max output with the Brightness control, along with a slight reduction in the Contrast slider to clean up the 100-percent luminance level.
We settled on settings of 59 for Brightness and 48 for Contrast in both sRGB and Adobe RGB modes. The Sharpness control was left at its default of 50.
